AI Usage Policy

You on the other hand, have for many years honed your craft. The more you learn, the more you discover to learn aka , you realize how little you know. They don't have this. _At all_. They see this as a "free ticket to the front row" and when we politely push back (we should be way harsher in this, its the only language they understand) all they hear is "he doesn't like _me_." which is an escape.

You know how much work you ask of me, when you open a PR on my project, they don't. They will just see it as "why don't you let me join, since I have AI I should have the same skill as you".... unironically.

In other words, these "other people" that we talk about haven't worked a day in the field in their life, so they simply don't understand much of it, however they feel they understand everything of it.

ever had a client second guess you by replying you a screenshot from GPT?

ever asked anything in a public group only to have a complete moron replying you with a screenshot from GPT or - at least a bit of effor there - a copy/paste of the wall of text?

no, people have no shame. they have a need for a little bit of (borrowed) self importance and validation.

Which is why i applaud every code of conduct that has public ridicule as punishment for wasting everybody's time

I am not saying one has to lose their shame, but at best, understand it.

Just like with email spam I would expect that a big part of the issue is that it only takes a minority of shameless people to create a ton of contribution spam. Unlike email spam these people actually want their contributions to be tied to their personal reputation. Which in theory means that it should be easier to identify and isolate them.

It's not necessarily maliciousness or laziness, it could simply be enthusiasm paired with lack of experience.

Any smart interviewer knows that you have to look at actual code of the contributions to confirm it was actually accepted and that it was a non-trivial change (e.g. not updating punctuation in the README or something).

In my experience this is where the PR-spammers fall apart in interviews. When they proudly tell you they’re a contributor to a dozen popular projects and you ask for direct links to their contributions, they start coming up with excuses for why they can’t find them or their story changes.

There are of course lazy interviewers who will see the resume line about having contributed to popular projects and take it as strong signal without second guessing. That’s what these people are counting on.

I've been deep-diving into AI code generation for more niche platforms, to see if it can either fill the coding gap in my skillset, or help me learn more code. And without writing my whole blog post(s) here, it's been fairly mediocre but improving over time.

But for the life of me I would never submit PRs of this code. Not if I can't explain every line and why it's there. And in preparation of publishing anything to my own repos I have a readme which explicitly states how the code was generated and requesting not to bother any upstream or community members with issues from it. It's just (uncommon) courtesy, no?

I’ll bet there are probably also people trying to farm accounts with plausible histories for things like anonymous supply chain attacks.

Two immediate ones I can think of:

- The yellow hue/sepia tone of any image coming out of ChatGPT

- People responding to text by starting with "Good Question!" or inserting hard-to-memorize-or-type unicode symbols like → into text where they obviously wouldn't have used that and have no history of using it.

You can expand this sentiment to everyday life. The things some people are willing to say and do in public is a never ending supply of surprising.

My guess is that those people have different incentives. They need to build a portfolio of open-source contributions, so shame is not of their concern. So, yeah, where you stand depends on where you sit.

My guess is it's mostly people from countries with a culture that reward shameless behavior.

I think this is interesting too. I've noticed the difference in dating/hook-up contexts. The people you're talking about also end up getting laid more but that group also has a very large intersection with sex pests and other shitty people. The thing they have in common though is that they just don't care what other people think about them. That leads some of them to be successful if they are otherwise good people... or to become borderline or actual crininals if not. I find it fascinating actually, like how does this difference come about and can it actually be changed or is it something we get early in life or from the genetic lottery.

The grift culture has changed that completely, now students face a lot of pressure to spam out PRs just to show they have contributed something.

i.e. imagine a change that is literally a small diff, that is easy to describe as a mere user and not a developer, and that requires quite a lot of deep understanding merely to submit as a PR (build the project! run the tests! write the template for the PR!).

Really a lot of this stuff ends up being a kind of failure mode of various projects that we all fall into at some point where "config" is in the code and what could be a simple change and test required a lot of friction.

Obviously not all submissions are going to be like this but I think I've tried a few little ones like that where I would normally just leave whatever annoyance I have alone but think "hey maybe it's 10 min faff with AI and a PR".

The structure of the project incentives kind of creates this. Increasing cost to contribution is a valid strategy of course, but from a holistic project point of view it is not always a good one especially assuming you are not dealing with adversarial contributors but only slightly incompetent ones.

it's easy to not have shame when you have no skin in the game... this is similar to how narcissists think so highly of themselves, it's never their fault

And this is one half of why I think

"Bad AI drivers will be [..] ridiculed in public."

isn't a good clause. The other is that ridiculing others, not matter what, is just no decent behavior. Putting it as a rule in your policy document makes it only worse.

The economics of it have changed, human nature hasn’t. Before 2023 (?) people also submitted garbage PRs just to be able to add “contributed to X” to their CV. It’s just become a lot cheaper.

It's one of those provisions that seem reasonable, but really have no justification. It's an attempt to allow something, while extracting a cost. If I am responsible for my code, and am considered the author in the PR, than you as the recipient don't have a greater interest to know than my own personal preference not to disclose. There's never been any other requirement to disclose anything of this nature before. We don't require engineers to attest to the operating system or the licensing of the tools they use, so materially outside your own purant interests, how does it matter?

However:

> AI generated code does not substitute human thinking, testing, and clean up/rewrite.

Isn't that the end goal of these tools and companies producing them?

According to the marketing[1], the tools are already "smarter than people in many ways". If that is the case, what are these "ways", and why should we trust a human to do a better job at them? If these "ways" keep expanding, which most proponents of this technology believe will happen, then the end state is that the tools are smarter than people at everything, and we shouldn't trust humans to do anything.

Now, clearly, we're not there yet, but where the line is drawn today is extremely fuzzy, and mostly based on opinion. The wildly different narratives around this tech certainly don't help.

[1]: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity

I would expect this is entirely uncontroversial and the AI qualifier redundant.

Quality of that verification matters, people who might use AI tend to cut corners. This does not completely solve problem with AI slop imo and solution quality. You ask Claude Code to go and implement a new feature in a complex code base, it will, the code might even work, but implementation might have subtle issues and might be missing the broader vision of the repo.

This sort of request may have made sense in the old days but as the quality of generated code rapidly increases, so does the necessity of human intervention decrease.

I think AI could help with that.

It really isn't, don't you recall the "protests" against Microsoft starting to use repositories hosted at GitHub for training their own coding models? Lots of articles and sentiments everywhere at the time.

Seems to have died down though, probably because most developers seemingly at this point use LLMs in some capacity today. Some just use it as a search engine replacement, others to compose snippets they copy-paste and others wholesale don't type code anymore, just instructions then review it.

I'm guessing Ghostty feels like if they'd ban generated text/code, they'd block almost all potential contributors. Not sure I agree with that personally, but I'm guessing that's their perspective.

I've written a fair amount of open source code. On anything like a per-capita basis, I'm way above median in terms of what I've contributed (without consent) to the training of these tools. I'm also specifically "in the crosshairs" in terms of work loss from automation of software development.

I don't find it hard to convince myself that I have moral authority to think about the usage of gen AI for writing code.

The same is not true for digital art.

There, the contribution-without-consent, aka theft, (I could frame it differently when I was the victim, but here I can't) is entirely from people other than me. The current and future damages won't be born by me.

It's actually reasonable and the guidance you provide on how to best use Ai when contributing to Zulip is :chef's kiss:

truly, I'm going to copy yours as a thank you!

However, at this point, the economic impact of trying to de tangle this mess would be so large, the courts likely won't do anything about it. You and I don't get to infringe on copyright; Microsoft, Facebook and Google sure do though.

Agree, slop isn't "the tool is so easy to use I can't review the code I'm producing", slop is the symptom of "I don't care how it's done, as long as it looks correct", and that's been a problem before LLMs too, the difference is how quickly you reach the "slop" state now, not that you have gate your codebase and reject shit code.

As always, most problems in "software programming" isn't about software nor programming but everything around it, including communication and workflows. If your workflow allows people to not be responsible for what they produce, and if allows shitty code to get into production, then that's on you and your team, not on the tools that the individuals use.

> Ghostty is written with plenty of AI assistance, and many maintainers embrace AI tools as a productive tool in their workflow. As a project, we welcome AI as a tool!

> Our reason for the strict AI policy is not due to an anti-AI stance, but instead due to the number of highly unqualified people using AI. It's the people, not the tools, that are the problem.

Basically don't write slop and if you want to contribute as an outsider, ensure your contribution actually is valid and works.

In an ideal world sure, but I've seen the entire gamut from amateurs making surprising work to experts whose prompt history looks like a comedy of errors and gotchas. There's some "skill" I can't quite put my finger on when it comes to the way you must speak to an LLM vs another dev. There's more monkey-paw involved in the LLM process, in the sense that you get what you want, but do you want what you'll get?

There's some sensible, easily-judged-by-a-human rules in here. I like the spirit of it and it's well written (I assume by Mitchell, not Claude, given the brevity).